Ezra Klein is calling this speech "the most important of [Obama's] young presidency" and "the most revealing of his career." Of course, in a world of 24-hour media attention and the possibility of some random moment going viral and becoming the storyline the mainstream media--and, thus, public opinion--will follow for days or weeks or months to come, practically any speech could potentially become the most "important" or "revealing" of any politician's career. But Ezra is on solid ground, I think, in making this claim. We all know why: health care reform--or rather, the larger political meaning that health reform has come to hold in minds of a great many Americans. For those who support it--even folks like myself whoaredepressed at how a chance to turn our nation in the direction of treating health as a public good has fallen from those heights down to that of a messy, conflicted, worthy-but-still-compromised social welfare program (and now, perhaps, not even that!)--it's fate reflects the promise of the Obama administration that fired us up a year or two ago. A promise that, even if we never fully bought into it, seemed real, in the sense of suggesting real action towards difficult but necessary civic goals. For those who oppose it, of course, it's fate represents a push-back against every bad thing they, rightly or wrongly (in all honesty, probably a little bit of both) associate with his administration: an unfeeling, even un-American intellectualism, a hard-ball determination to imagine a center-right nation as more liberal (in the contemporary sense) than it is or wants to be.

I wonder if that sets us up for failure though--a failure even more profound than the failure of national health insurance reform or any other such broad legislative measure could be. I wonder if it makes us look at the wrong thing: at what Obama is trying to do, rather than at how he's trying to do it. And I wonder, also, whether to two can be separated at all.

Peter Levine suggests they can, at least far enough to properly prioritize them: and for Peter, the latter is clearly more important than the former. Peter's great theme has always been civic action and participatory democracy, with all the communitarian and populist implications which follow from that--he's a strong supporter of health care reforms which will empower individuals to escape the corporate monopolies which dominate our system, to be sure--but he doesn't put the cart of such political content before the horse of political context regarding how it is to be achieved. Levine is frustrated with Paul Krugman, who--after the travails of health care reform over the past two weeks--has declared that he's "pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama." Peter will have none of it, and what he says speaks to the communitarian, the populist, the civic republican in me:

Obama never said he was the one we were waiting for. He said (quoting a line from the Civil Rights Movement): "We're the one's we've been waiting for." This was in the context of explicitly arguing that change does not come from the top down, but from the bottom up. The lack of bottom-up pressure for health reform is a major reason why the bill is being dropped. No major progressive organizations or movements really fought for a bill that could pass Congress, and you can't win a legislative battle without grassroots support.

Now Peter is, I think, eliding a point in how he makes this argument: there were plenty of progressive organizations who fought for the bill--I was part of that fighting, for whatever it was worth here in Kansas--so it's not as thought support was lacking. What was lacking, perhaps, was the ability to follow through, with just as much fervor, once Joe Lieberman kicked away that last option for passing a bill in the Senate which included something that could have become truly social and comprehensive and public. Or maybe not--I'm not sure how to measure that, absent tabulating every phone call, e-mail and Tweet every member of Congress received. But doesn't the fading of civic determination tell us as much about the nature of the American civitas, as it does about our level of civic responsibility and hope as well?

E.J. Dionne thinks the answer is simple: Obama is a believer in civic engagement--and he was wrong to trust in it. He shouldn't, at least when it came to something as large as health care, have tried to "bring the country together." Dionne sees a contradiction in "Obama's commitment to sweeping change and his soothing pragmatism that disdains public fights," and he may be right. Where's the determined leadership? Where's the...well, the content? Can you really conceptually, philosophically, approach a democratic community without presupposing what that democratic community is for--without offering them real specifics about how one intends to interact with that community (and, in our polity, interacting with the national community, at least in an immediately politically effectual way, means using a party, with a platform and goals and all the rest)? Of course, it's not as though Obama hasn't done any of that; on the contrary, he's done a lot. But in the present, very delicate moment, where hope is not yet dead but certainly on life support, perhaps his devotion to a certain civic context, to always encouraging Democrats and Republicans alike to "coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on"...well, perhaps it an betrays inexperience, an unwillingness to fully use the office of the presidency, maybe even an over-reliance upon a pragmatism which borders upon a religion, a deep commitment to the process of listening to the experiences of ordinary people. Which is entirely appropriate to a community organizer, but not so much for a man who, for better or worse, occupies the office of the presidency.

There's a lot of frustration out there; I suppose there always is, but this frustration stands out to me, because it seems to come back, again and again, to our size and diversity, and the sense that maybe civil discussion is a literal impossibility in America today. Patrick Deneen, for one; but then Patrick has suspected (and for good reason; let's not deny that) that America has become an all-but-ungovernable empire for a while now. But even Tim Burke, who has always struck me as an unflappable defender of modern complexity, seems to agree. To the depressing battle over health care in 2009 he's found himself making fatalistic noises: shrugging his shoulders hopelessly, saying "Whatever," adding in the comments that he doubts there's any real communicative, democratic context worth its name in America any more: "[T]he proposition that there’s some communicative connection that can happen, that the content of speech and ideas isn't just a projection of a habitus, that we can somehow connect the hubs and spokes of a social network and make something that links the situated knowledges of people to systematic improvements in our institutions? It just seems like a stupid thing to have ever believed that possible." If he's right--and he may be--then should Obama make any attempt tonight to defend how he aspires to lead America, as opposed to what he's leading us towards, it'll be worse than a joke: it'll be a waste.

As for myself...well, I've defended context over content plenty of times over the years, and I'm not willing to give up on it yet. Maybe I'm wrong to have become so susceptible to disappointment; maybe I've been valuing a particular content--health care reform--too much. Then again, that's a reform which can save lives, and what's the point of a healthy civic context if you can't democratically use it? As usual, I'm wishy-washy. So I'll watch the speech tonight, and think about the slow, hard, longdefeat of those who try to do right, in the right way, knowing that they'll nearly always lose, or at best win far less than they'd originally dreamed. Maybe, in the midst of such somber thoughts, Representative Wilson will be an ass again. I know I'll at least have something definitive to say about that.

You have a point, anonymous. The government is most certainly center-right, if you want to use that left-right metric; thanks to the Senate, rural states have a proportional advantage in legislation, giving conservative voices more strength than their numbers' actually deserve (and that's to say nothing of the influence which predominantly conservative/right-libertarian corporate forces have via campaign finance). But the country itself? Clearly large majorities support many liberal causes, but as you say, I think that by and large Americans don't recognize them as "liberal." Which is another reason, in the long-term, to work towards a language of identity or cultural politics--which historically, goes by the name of "populism"--that presents liberal notions in a different, more democratically acceptable context. Populism is a bad word for many liberals, and for good reason, but I really don't know of any other option.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."